Rectilinear building roof contour extraction based on snakes and dynamic programming

This paper presents a method for extracting building roof contours from digital images collected over urban landscapes. The proposed method utilizes an energy function based on snakes that represents building roof contours in digital images and is optimized with a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm. Because most building roof contours are characterized by rectilinear sides that intercept at right angles, appropriate geometric constraints are enforced in the previously reported snake-based energy function. The main advantage of using the DP algorithm for optimizing the proposed snake-based energy function is its better radius of convergence compared to that typically obtained in the original solution based on variational approaches. Experimental evaluation, which included visual inspections and numerical analyses, was performed using real data, and the obtained results demonstrated that the proposed method has significant potential for successfully extracting building roof contours from digital images. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.